Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computerized spell checking in a document and more particularly to user dictionary utilization in text input field spell checking of a form.
Description of the Related Art
In computing, a spell checker is a computer program or a module of a computer program that detects words in a document or in a field of a form that may not be spelled correctly. A spell checker customarily includes both a set of logical routines for scanning text and extracting words (parsing), and for comparing the parsed words against a known list of correctly spelled words—namely a dictionary. Depending upon the computer program supported by the spell checker, the dictionary can be limited to a discrete set of application specific words, or the dictionary can be an exhaustive representation of the words of a language. Advanced forms of the spell check even can provide for hyphenation points, lexical and grammatical attributes and in some cases, synonym and antonyms to the words.
Most spell checkers additionally provide for user modification to the dictionary or user supplementation of the dictionary with a user dictionary to account for words known to the user to be spelled correctly though indicated otherwise in the spell checker dictionary. Such is known as a user dictionary. When a spell checker utilizes both a main dictionary and also a user dictionary, each word in a document is used as input to the main dictionary and failing a match the same word in the document is used as input to the user dictionary. In this way, words that are known to be spelled correctly to the end user may be added to the main dictionary so as to provide for spell checking of documents with words uniquely spelled, but validly spelled from the perspective of the end user.
Spell checking is not limited to documents produced in a word processor. Rather, spell checking has found widespread application to many other types of documents including e-mail messages, spreadsheets, drawings and even text input fields of other computer programs. In respect to text input fields, generally spell checking is limited to words found in a single, main dictionary. There is no utilization of a user dictionary in spell checking fields of a forms based application. Even still, for many applications, text input includes words known to be spelled correctly to the end user, but missing from a main dictionary. Examples include addressing information and name information. Depending upon the text field and the particular form in which the text field is presented, requiring strict adherence in spell checking to particular spelling of a word in the main dictionary may or may not be appropriate depending upon the context of the word spelled as presented in the text input field.